DSL issues in London

Some C2 customers in the London area may currently be experiencing DSL issues due to an incident at the West End BT exchange. BT engineers are trying to restore services after a flood prompted a fire in the exchange. BT expect to have services restored shortly.

Scheduled maintenance 6th December 10:00 and 16:00

Hi,

We have been advised by our network provider that as part of their capacity planning they are having to move the current line between IFL and Telecity Williams to another line. Though the window for the required work is between 10:00 and 16:00, they expect that the line will only be down for 1 hour. However the remaining two legs of the ring will remain untouched, so customers should not notice any disruption to service, but the Manchester ring will obviously be more at risk of interruption while testing takes place.

We have insisted that this work be completed while we are in contact with their engineers, so that if we notice anything unexpected on the network, we can get any work reversed immediately.


Kind Regards

Stuart McKindley

Removal of secondary mail server mail-relay20.c2internet.net

Due to hardware failure the server mail-relay20.c2internet.net is being removed from service.

This server's only role was to operate as a secondary/backup mx to customers requesting this functionality where those customers operated their own primary mail servers.

While initially this type of setup was the norm as the war against spam continues these type of backup servers have been targetted as easy routes in. This brings rise to a few problems;

It's not uncommon for these backup servers to be whitelisted/trusted by the primary server, thus totally defeating any anti-spam techniques they are utilising. The backup servers will accept all mail for the domains where it is told to be the secondary, if when forwarding that email to the primary server the primary server rejects a mailbox as unknown the backup server will want to send a non-delivery report. If the originating email was from a forged email address then these NDR's clog the system further which just puts extra load on the server for no real good reason. Worst case is the NDR's are sent to a valid email address but one which had nothing to do with the original email, at which point the server is generating backscatter which is every bit as bad as spam.

If the primary mail server was to fail most sending servers will now quite happily queue email, notify the sender of any sending delays and generally look after sending the email again after a few minutes when the server comes back up.

With all this in mind will we shortly be removing all entries from DNS for mail-relay20.c2internet.net. The unusual thing here is customers who have been using the service may well see a drop in the amount of incoming spam to that of which they had been used to.

This does not affect customers that have their own secondary mail servers

DSL Connections via BT

-- 15:15

Fault is now cleared - we will continue to monitor.

Apologies for any inconvenience.



-- 14:26

We're seeing a number of lines coming back up, though as yet have had no notification of this fault being cleared. We will continue to monitor.


-- 13:49

There is an issue affecting a number of tail circuits that are provided over the BT wholesale network. This is affecting a number of ISPs and is not related to anything within our network or anything under our direct control. The issue is being investigated and more information will be posted as soon as is available.

Service Outage report for 10th November 2010

17:32-

We've just had confirmation that the outage was from two separate faults happening in two separate geographic locations, one fault was on the providers Leeds to Sheffield connection, the other on their Warrington to Birmingham connection.



13:42-

At 10:50am this morning we lost both our west and east-bound connections from Manchester to London, this had the outcome of partitioning our core network into two. This partitioning would have caused routing issues and due to the location of name and radius servers within the network name lookup and xDSL authentication would also have failed.

Our transit feed out of Manchester was also experiencing problems which as this issue cleared at the same time our connections came back up was no doubt down to the same core root problem.

With the issue affecting multiple providers it was clear the problem was itself not within any equipment within our direct control or the outcome of any of our actions within the network.

Our main telephone system is also based out of Manchester however when the server went offline it failed over onto the backup analogue PSTN system, the number of incoming calls obviously proving a challenge.

We're currently in discussion with our network provider for the Manchester to London connections as these routes should be separate and diverse, initially they also went via separate providers however due to consolidation within the market one provider has ended up owning both networks. If it transpires that our provider has without our knowledge or authorisation joined these pathways then of course action will be taken.

At 12:40pm both connections came back up, with the exception of transit our of Manchester once the network had re-converged connections and traffic flows returned to normal. Approximately ten minutes after our connections re-established transit via our transit provider also re-established.

Our apologies for this outage and the inconvenience.

Upstream transit provider

-- 9:00AM

We're currently experiencing packet loss on one of our upstream transit providers. The connection needs to remain active for a short while to allow us to run diagnostics before passing the call to our provider.

-- 9:25am

Sessions to this transit provider have now been shutdown and traffic is flowing via alternative pathways, another upstrean provider however is also now showing packet loss so this provider has also been disabled.

General Service Issues

4:00AM - Customers may be experiencing some general connectivity issues ranging from some Internet hosts being unavailable through to DSL lines not reconnecting after a reboot.

There appears to be a service outage in London which is affecting some of our suppliers, this outage is affecting multiple providers.

If you are experiencing any issues please do not reboot your router at this stage.

More information will be posted as it becomes available

5:40AM - Most of the affected circuits came back up approx 15 mins ago, work is continuing to restore the remainder as soon as possible.

6:50AM - The remaining circuits have now re-established - all connectivity has returned to normal.

Browsing / Access delays

Customers are experiences delays in reaching some parts of the Internet.

---

11:04am Sites giving problems are those we would normally access through Telehouse North in London, we have therefore closed down transit and peering at THN which is forcing traffic to take alternative routes through differant transit partners. this has impoved things to some sites however some others remain problematic. The issues causing these delays are located outside of our network and thus outside of our control, we are waiting on updates as to when these problems will be corrected, we will then enable once more peering and transit at THN. Apologies to those customers affected by this issue.

C2 21CN ADSL

5pm - We're experiencing some issues with our 21CN connections failing to reconnect after a reboot, BT are investigating, if your connection is 21CN please do not do a manual reboot until the problem is resolved. Thanks.


8:37pm - Problems appear to be resolved, most of the disconnected sessions have come back online - incident should be considered closed, we will however continue to monitor for a while.

C2 DSL Network

We're experiencing some issues on the DSL network, engineers are investigating, the problem is affecting multiple interconnects at multiple locations but does not appear to be core network related.